So, last night, sometime after 11, one of the boys IM's me asking if I can help get their site to work.

OK, that's funny in and of itself. Even funnier-- despite my 12-hour workdays and 8am client consultations, I actually tried to help until 2:30am :P

Now, I know that I have good friends here who would be happy to offer terrific deals to the kids for webhosting. But they wanted to do it themselves, and decided upon the webhost Powweb.com, which apparently offers ridiculous amounts of space and bandwidth for a ridiculous price.

Imagine my surprise when I couldn't get the site to upload properly. I followed all of Powweb's (rather bizarre) ftp instructions, and even tried doing what I would normally do with any other site. No luck.

Anywho, the funniest part is the email response I got when everything I tried didn't work. This is what I sent them through their online tech support form:

Hi there--

Have been having some problems getting the site published-- it publishes fine via dreamweaver or ftp to the temp site ([TEMPSITEADDRESS.COM]), but publishing to the actual site proper ([SITEADDRESS.NET]) can only be achieved through the site manager. In fact, I figured it was simply a problem with propogation until the site manager worked! Is this a DNS issue, a server issue, or am I missing something here?

Thanks so much for your help,

Carolyne

Not up for a Pulitzer or anything-- but at least it's clear, concise, and defines the problems I'd been having, right?

This is what I got back:

Hello,

you

are using as the hostname when you publish your file through Dreamweaver.

Winston A.

Yes. Of course. Well, that certainly helped clear things up for me!

I tried replying to that elucidating email, only to have it bounce back. So I sent the following through the same tech support form I sent the first one:

When I was one, I was just begun. When I was two, I was nearly new. When I was three, I was hardly me. When I was four, I was not much more. When I was five, I was just alive. But now that I'm six, I'm as clever as clever. I think I'll stay six now for ever and ever.